Show Me Your Environment And I’ll Tell You How Successful You’ll Be.

Optimize your environment to elevate your life.

Photo by Neal E. Johnson on Unsplash

Your environment is the best predictor of your future success.

Environmental factors will either enable your success or weaken it, and it’s unlikely that your surroundings will play no role at all.

Designing and maintaining an environment that’s conducive to your success is one of the simplest ways that you can drastically improve your life.

Optimize your environment to elevate your life.

Like plants, your life thrives under certain conditions.

The thoughts in your mind, the people you surround yourself with and what you expose yourself to every day will either inhibit or facilitate your future growth and success. There is no way around it.

This is not to say that you can’t be successful if you didn’t grow up in a positive environment but I will say that you will need to change your environment to change your odds of success.

Your environment tells you where you’re going. You just have to listen.

The Most Important Environment To Control.

What fears are holding you back?

Success starts between your ears.

You can’t expect to achieve in your life what you can’t first see in your mind. The first challenge to success in any field is getting your mindset right.

If you can’t first imagine it, you will never have it. This isn’t just positive thinking to becoming a millionaire or manifesting a Ferrari. That’s just being a wanker.

I am talking about controlling your emotional stability and response to adversity. A mind that can handle challenges, can handle success.

“If you don’t rule your mind, it will rule you”

— Eliud Kipchoge

The people who were able to transcend early childhood adversity are those who had a resolute belief that their life will turn out better. That their current circumstances were only temporary and a better future awaited them.

They weren’t deluded. Only determined. They understood that their life could be changed by their efforts. They embodied a growth mindset that propelled their life forward.

That’s why the attitude you have towards your life will determine the altitude you reach in your life. Your success will never go beyond your own belief. A plant can’t grow bigger than the pot it is in and neither can your mind.

Your attitude is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The story you tell yourself every day becomes the story you live your life by. If you think of yourself poorly, your life will only reflect what you think.

The quality of your mind will determine the quality of your life.

Social Environment

Is everyone I surround myself with making me a better person?

Everything from your health, career and financial decisions is shaped by the people around you.

If your goals don’t align with the group of people you surround yourself with, you’ll have a hard time achieving your goals. How hard do you think quitting smoking will be if everyone around you smokes like a chimney?

In the past 2 years, I’ve distanced myself from a lot of my high school friends. They are great people but all they want to talk about is drinking and partying. I want to talk about business and ideas.

There is no anger, hate, or animosity. I just needed a new social environment where the success and goals I want to achieve are valued and nurtured. We might reconnect again someday. But for now, we are on our own journey.

If I have a goal I want to achieve, I’ll form meaningful relationships with people who want the same thing or have already achieved it. If you’re the smartest one in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

Surround yourself with people who lift you up. The right circle of influence and support will create the conditions for achieving your goals.

Even trees and plants support each other in a forest.

Peter Woholleben, the author of The Hidden Life of Trees, describes how surrounding trees will provide nutrients via their roots and will allow more sunlight exposure to other struggling trees.

The trees you decide to surround yourself with will predict your level of growth and maturity. Choose wisely.

As Tim Ferriss said,

“You are the average of the five people you associate with most, so do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends. If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.”

Physical Environment

What does your environment say about you?

Your physical environment cues you for certain behaviors and constrains the set of potential actions you can take.

If you live in a house with junk food available in the fridge, freezer, pantry and kitchen benchtops, what do you think your diet is going to look like?

Your physical environment primes the architecture of choices available to you. We default to the path of least resistance. We will take the easiest route, even if it conflicts with our goals.

That’s why a small change in what you can see leads to a big shift in what you do. Designing your environment with purpose and intention makes discipline and success a certainty, rather than a lottery.

If you want to create success, make it a bigger part of your physical environment.

Make reading books easy and watching Netflix hard. Leave healthy foods around you and throw away any processed junk. Make deep work easy and distractions hard.

Environment design allows you to take back control and become the architect of your life.

Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.

Summary:

If you want a different future, make a change to your environment today.

Your environment shapes your perceptions of choice. And perceptions of choice influence choices of action.

This is why based on your internal, social and physical environment, I can predict where you’ll be in a decade. Your current environment maps where you’re going to be in 10 years, you just don’t realize it.

Success in your life won’t be random. Achievements aren’t spontaneous. They are cumulative and compound. Tipping points and breakthroughs occur after consistent effort over a long period of time.

Just like a plant can’t outgrow the size of the pot, soil and nutrients it receives, you can’t outgrow the mental, social and physical environment you put yourself in without changing it.

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